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Gender data disclosure and debate are essential first steps towards improving gender diversity, and the powerful institutions in Europe's capital markets industry are no exception to the rule.

A report just out by New Financial, a London-based think tank and forum advocating fresh thinking on how the capital markets work, offers insight. It compares 11 different sectors of the capital markets - including banks, asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks and pension funds. Its findings should provide food for thought, as well as much-needed open debate in an industry that tends to a preference for conversations behind closed doors.

"As an industry we need a broader mix of thoughts, ideas and opinions if we are to understand and deliver the financial outcomes our clients expect. European capital markets serve a diverse population - we need to look and think more like our whole customer base, not just a part of it,” says Alison Jefferis, head of corporate communications, EMEA & Asia at Columbia Threadneedle Investments,which supported the report.

A look at the findings of the report, "Counting Every Woman 2016," suggests a wide range of gender diversity in the sector and a tendency for women to congregate in roles that are then not deemed worthy of having representation at executive committee level.

Average female representation at the highest levels across the European capital markets industry Source: Counting Every Woman 2016 (Measuring Female Representation on Boards and Executive Committees in European Capital Markets) by Yasmine Chinwala and Laurence Bax London, January 2016

"Where women do sit on executive committees, they tend to be in support roles (seen as cost centers) rather than 'profit and loss' functions (seen as revenue generating or profit centers). We found nearly two thirds of heads of communications (64%) and more than half of heads of HR (58%) on executive committees (Excos) were women, but only 12% of heads of a division or region are female, and just 11% of the C-suite," says Yasmine Chinwala, a Partner at New Financial and coauthor of the report.

That sent me musing on a hypothetical question: if there was a role in charge of "ethics and culture" at a bank (think a combination of compliance, communication and HR), would it be a "cost center" role - or a "profit and loss function?" Don't forget those litigation costs, and discuss...the role of business in society surely depends in part on how the business defines and ranks the importance of its day to day operations.

Please do not miss the percentage of women in board positions in the above graphic, when they are there because of employee representation policies in some European countries. Workers have the right to be represented on company boards in 19 European countries, and this applies in countries with a unitary board system like the U.K. as well as those with a two-tier board system such as Germany.

The New Financial report has some interesting projections. "If the capital markets industry set a voluntary target of 33% female representation on boards (like the U.K.'s Davies Review’s recommendation of 33% by 2020) it would take on average six years to achieve it, and if the industry chose a target of 25% for Excos, it would take just over 10 years to achieve it (based on 2015 numbers of net new women appointed)," it says.

But some of those who have followed the gender diversity debate (one could justifiably at this stage start calling it an ongoing historic saga) will note that there are "voluntary targets" and there are "quotas."

'Countries with quotas lead the charge' Source: New Financial report (see above) London, January 2016

Finally, as with all ground-breaking initiatives that can lead to reform of an entire way of thinking, it is important to applaud those who are leading the way, and hope they will speak up.